Every Great Writer Is a Thief — And Here's the Proof

Every Great Writer Is a Thief — And Here's the Proof

Shakespeare stole plots like a pickpocket at a county fair. Tolstoy borrowed from the French. The Brontës recycled Gothic trash into masterpieces. Before you clutch your pearls over the latest plagiarism scandal, consider this: the entire history of literature is one long, glorious chain of theft, and the greatest writers who ever lived were the most shameless criminals of all. The only question is where we draw the line between a heist and an homage.

Let's start with the Bard himself, shall we? William Shakespeare — the man whose name is practically synonymous with literary genius — didn't invent a single one of his major plots. Not one. "Romeo and Juliet"? Lifted from Arthur Brooke's 1562 poem "The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet," which was itself stolen from an Italian novella by Matteo Bandello. "King Lear"? Borrowed from Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Historia Regum Britanniae," written in 1136. "Othello"? Swiped from Cinthio's "Hecatommithi." If Shakespeare were writing today, he'd have a dozen lawsuits and a Twitter mob on his doorstep before breakfast.

But here's the thing nobody wants to admit: Shakespeare made those stolen plots better. Incomparably, devastatingly better. Brooke's "Romeus and Juliet" is about as exciting as reading a tax return. Shakespeare took the same bones and wrapped them in language so electrifying that people are still weeping over it four centuries later. That's not plagiarism. That's alchemy.

Now fast-forward to the nineteenth century, when things got really messy. In 1847, Charlotte Brontë published "Jane Eyre." That same year, her sister Emily dropped "Wuthering Heights." Both novels feature dark, brooding men with terrible secrets and women who refuse to be tamed. Coincidence? Sure. But then consider that both sisters had been devouring the same Gothic novels, the same Byron, the same Romantic poetry. They were drinking from the same well. Is that theft, or is that just what happens when two geniuses share a bookshelf?

The real scandal came later. In 1856, a French journalist named Eugène de Mirecourt accused Alexandre Dumas of running a "fiction factory" — essentially hiring ghostwriters to produce novels under his name. Dumas had collaborators, the most famous being Auguste Maquet, who plotted out large chunks of "The Three Musketeers" and "The Count of Monte Cristo." Dumas took the credit, the fame, and the fortune. Maquet sued. The courts said Dumas owed him money but not authorship. Sound familiar? It should. The ghostwriting industry is worth billions today, and half the celebrity memoirs on your shelf were written by someone whose name appears nowhere on the cover.

But let's talk about the case that really makes people squirm: H.G. Wells versus Jules Verne. Verne publicly accused Wells of stealing his ideas, particularly around science fiction concepts like submarines and space travel. Wells fired back that Verne was a "dull man" who merely described machines, while he, Wells, explored ideas. The truth? Neither stole from the other. They were both responding to the same cultural moment — the explosion of industrial technology in the late nineteenth century. Two men looked at the same steam engine and imagined two different futures. That's not theft. That's convergent evolution.

And yet, sometimes it really is just plain stealing. In 1920, a writer named Opal Whiteley published "The Story of Opal," supposedly a diary she'd written as a child in the Oregon wilderness. It was a sensation. Then people noticed that her descriptions of nature bore an uncanny resemblance to passages from established naturalists. Her childhood diary, it turned out, had been heavily "embellished" — or fabricated entirely. The book vanished from shelves. Whiteley spent the rest of her life in a psychiatric institution. The line between inspiration and fraud, it turns out, has consequences.

Here's where it gets philosophically interesting. The ancient Greeks had no concept of plagiarism. None. The idea that a story could belong to someone would have struck Homer as absurd. Stories belonged to everyone. You took a myth, you retold it, you made it your own. The concept of intellectual property is a modern invention, born in the eighteenth century alongside copyright law. Before that, borrowing wasn't just acceptable — it was expected. Milton borrowed from the Bible. Virgil borrowed from Homer. Homer probably borrowed from some guy around a campfire whose name we'll never know.

The twentieth century gave us the most brazen case of literary borrowing that somehow escaped scandal. T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" — arguably the most important poem of the modern era — is essentially a collage of other people's words. Eliot quotes Dante, Shakespeare, Ovid, Wagner, and a Buddhist text, among dozens of others. He didn't hide it. He put footnotes in. But imagine a novelist doing the same thing today — stitching together passages from thirty different authors and calling it a novel. They'd be crucified. So why does Eliot get a pass? Because poetry, apparently, operates under different rules. Or maybe because genius is its own license.

The uncomfortable truth is this: there are only so many stories. Christopher Booker argued there are exactly seven basic plots. Others say three. Some say one — someone wants something and has trouble getting it. Every love story echoes every other love story. Every revenge tale walks in the footsteps of a thousand revenge tales before it. If we prosecuted every writer who used a plot that someone else had used first, we'd have to burn down every library on earth.

So where does that leave us? With a distinction that's more feeling than formula. Plagiarism is when you take someone's words or very specific ideas and pass them off as your own. Inspiration is when you take a spark — a concept, a structure, a what-if — and build something new from it. The difference isn't in the borrowing. It's in the transformation. Did you add something? Did you make it yours? Did you take the reader somewhere they hadn't been before?

Let me leave you with this. In 1932, William Faulkner was asked about literary influences. He said: "Immature artists copy. Great artists steal." The quote is often attributed to Picasso. Before him, to T.S. Eliot. Before him, to somebody else. The greatest line about literary theft has itself been stolen so many times that nobody knows who said it first. If that's not proof that borrowing is the beating heart of all art, I don't know what is. So the next time someone accuses your favorite writer of being a fraud, ask yourself: did they steal, or did they transform? And if you can't tell the difference, maybe the theft was just that good.